Helical Majorana edge mode in a superconducting antiferromagnetic quantum spin Hall insulator

TL;DR

This paper proposes a feasible setup to realize and detect helical Majorana edge modes in superconducting antiferromagnetic quantum spin Hall insulators, highlighting their robustness and quantized conductance signatures.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to induce and observe helical Majorana modes in a specific topological insulator system with superconducting proximity effect.

Findings

Helical Majorana edge mode can be induced by proximity effect in the proposed system.

The HMEM leads to quantized $e^2/h$ conductance.

Quantized conductance remains stable under small symmetry-breaking disorders.

Abstract

A two-dimensional time-reversal symmetric topological superconductor is a fully gapped system possessing a helical Majorana mode on the edges. This helical Majorana edge mode (HMEM), which is a Kramer's pair of two chiral Majorana edge modes in the opposite propagating directions, is robust under time-reversal symmetry protection. We propose a feasible setup and accessible measurement to provide the preliminary step of the HMEM realization by studying superconducting antiferromagnetic quantum spin Hall insulators. Since this antiferromagnetic topological insulator hosts a helical electron edge mode and preserves effective time-reversal symmetry, which is the combination of time-reversal symmetry and crystalline symmetry, the proximity effect of the conventional s-wave superconducting pairing can directly induce a single HMEM. We further show the HMEM leads to the observation of an $e^2/h$ conductance, and this quantized conductance survives even in the presence of small symmetry-breaking disorders.